Mark IV

I got my first BB gun when I was about 11. My dad was a gun safety bug, taught by his dad and the Army, and that training has served me well lo these many years. I learned respect for the animals I hunt from the same source. I think the BB gun is the right way to start, provided you accept that the responsibility is as much yours as his, at that age. That's what you have to pass along... no amount of "sorrys" can erase a mistake with a gun.

Wishes posted in the appropriate dank and fetid place.

I'll take pyrotechnics over blood any day. I've been around both blood and explosions (not in a real war) and I vastly prefer explosions. Of course, I prefer them both at a reasonable distance.

Peng: Pore carefully through those viscous greenish hunks for the thoughts of your friends in the Cesspool, which are with you until you hawk them up. Wherever you expectorate, there we are. Look, there's a little Goanna now, poking it's head up. This, of course, is what comes of sitting for days and weeks on people's turns. I should pound you again when you recover, as it's been awhile. I am currently in the midst of a very painful transition from NT to W2K on the old laptop, and will shortly emerge a triumphant mobile wargamer (with sh*t for graphics) or stark raving mad. If it weren't for hardware and software this would be easy... damn Microsoft, Dell, and our IS department to successive levels of hell. Get out of that hospital and back here where it's healthy...

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by THumpre: (Finger-wiggle-in-ear)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> OK, I'm replying to a gesture? Middle-finger-in-air to you, fella. How's that feel? Kinda like nothin'? Zackly. Even Hiram's more offensive than that. If I wasn't blasted right now- don't let me catch you here in the morning, young man. Now get off our lawn. Shoo, go on with you. That's it.

Peng-threaders led this charge, doof.

Nice fin. So like I was saying: Bugger you lot. Crodette is my only 1.1b game, and we are noticing Things. Veterans ain't, Artillery doesn't, and his troops are still placed with less tactical acumen than sidewalk Salvation Army Santas. The AI's all to blame for his impending defeat. Boo hoo hoo. Make me attack uphill in clear terrain as Amis again and buy yourself some fuel-air bombs, ya little punk. Some of you have noticed some recent tardiness on my part, i.e. 24 hours between turns, a model most of you would aspire to, if you had any aspirations beyond your next burrito. No excuse and sod off, that's the way it is. Cry me a river. I would tell you how busy I am, but for most of you "busy" involves short bursts of manual dexterity of a nature shocking and despicable. Real Life will probably go on through February so there's my frigging life story if you care, and you should. Schedule accordingly. It revolts me when I think how important my posts must be to most of you. Sure, I can hear you all now: Croda: I'll grind your ass into tacos and feed them to someone's chihuahua and feed that to a pitbull and sic it on mensch and take the little menschy part out of its poop and roll it into little balls that I'll shoot into the NYSE and call all my options and sell short and... OFSG: Ach rae ti ma rublee ye bonnie bilaghie ee foe nae ta blae me gochlamie tae soon... mensch: we'll miss you like a bent-barreled shotgun which I invented to shoot around corners and do you ever wonder why there are corners in a round universe and if it's round why isn't it an omniverse and they're coming to take me away, haha, they're coming to take me away... Berli: Piss off. Seanachai: Zs;erktjr;ijtir jbrisjnbir ljngbslkjhsn; lfjh s;klgfjh s;lkdjh s;klfdjhgsl kdjngskl;dfjgskl dhgjf gskl;dfjhgs; klfdjhgskl cvbn djhgklfdjhtjhetuyioutryiour njhdnjgcklbjxcmnb xyuhfs;wur'aq ti 'aqokhrjtndkgfjb zdkfjg kjtrh s'jtrskl rjthskldjrg slkjhsklrjh s/klrjhskldfjhg skljhs klgfdjb xcklgfjhb klgfjh s;klgjh ;fjhfjhklgfjh fklgjht;l.... Germanboy: You stupid amerikaniche dummkopfen, ich bin englisch! I am a madame-fellow! I vant to be your freund! Vorship me now! Hiram: Ok. bauhaus: He said ok, didn't he? Pawbroon: Stand on the floor, bauhaus, it is not yet to be punctured without roses. Haha. ... and so forth. Anyway, you all have your bloody turns now.

Done. And it is hard to believe they overlooked CMBO. A search turned up a reference and link to the September interview with Charles (guru3d.com). That's about it. The rest of this site is so Shockwave-intensive that's it's quite unpleasant to view at 28.8. But we must educate them anyway!

NO, the opposite. The ricochet goes away, but it remains a bullet, and can hurt another vehicle if it hits it. It could bounce off a tank, without hurting the tank, but then it could hit a truck or half-track and still kill it. The broken up shell only disappears. It will not hurt anything. NO, l'opposto. Il ricochet va via, ma rimane una pallottola e può danneggiare un altro veicolo se lo colpisce. Potrebbe rimbalzare fuori d'unserbatoio, senza danneggiare il serbatoio, ma allora potrebbe colpire un camion o half-track ed ancora ucciderlo. Rotto sulle coperture sparisce soltanto. Non danneggerà nulla.

Here is a Babelfish (GO Translator) version. I have no idea what it says, is it funny? Un ricochet significa che la pallottola ha colpito l'armatura su un angolo e rimbalza fuori senza nuoc il veicolo. La pallottola può continuare a volare in un nuovo qualcos'altro di hurt e di senso. Se la pallottola si rompe in su, non frantuma e fa danno. Alcune pallottole erano male manufactured o erano semplicemente troppo deboli per sconfiggere l'armatura.

Ricochet= shell strikes glancing blow and bounces off. Shell broke up= shell shattered on impact without penetrating the armor.

Existential angst in the Cesspool? This is sheer madness. Menschy, you've done stared into the Abyss too long, though it's resulted in some of your more readable prose. We embrace chaos, doubt, and uncertainty here. Nothingness is our Everything, you fool. Answers would only destroy the Beautiful Question. All that matters is our artillery arriving on time. Kill, kill, and kill again. Die-a-lot Now . Don't think... react. Those are all the answers you bloody need. If you want self-torment, have Hiram put your thoughts to verse and read them aloud. Start a new thread with "Wouldn't it be cool if..." in the subject line. Thanks for sharing your crisis with us, and remember that most of us have trouble distinguishing you from jshandorf. Hope this helps.

One more vote again for the PTO... and Korea, dammit. I wanna do Singapore. Wild Bill, I'll bet a bag of yen you've got a Pacific mod going somewhere... And once again, my GF of long standing is a real live Jap from Japan. She is offended when she knows "Jap" is meant as an insult, but has no problem with it as shorthand. You can usually tell how it is meant. Jap cameras rule, "dirty Japs" is insulting (I think they find the notion of dirt more insulting than the epithet). The Japanese are pretty together in the self-esteem department. What I find curious is the notion that other Asians would find it insulting. They have far more pejorative nicks for the Japanese.

Always behind the trends, dammit. (Ahem) I, too, would like to thank Andreas... for dying along with his Veteran troops like a weighted sack of kittens. Now there are two thoughts to put a simile on your face.* Where is Lorak when you need him? PeterNZer... if Croda had your luck, he'd find a shiny copper in the chromosome repair kit left unopened in a forgotten drawer. I feel violated, and shabbily dealt with, by your other sneaking tank. A nation that cheats at sailing certainly can't be trusted with AFVs. Damn you from the bottom of my heart. *American readers, particularly those from the California public system, please note that the above spelling of "simile" is intentional. It's like, ironic, dudes.

Originally posted by David Aitken: There is already a question mark over the morality of CM in itself. As you might imagine, I am happy with historical wargames, but there are doubtlessly many people out there who are not. They're not here. People who don't play wargames are not relevant to this discussion. People who do, but are never "happy" with wargames, are called... grognards? There is no more question about CM's morality than there is about any other game, or the first carved soldiers and those cast of tin or lead (and CM is more environmentally sound!). Why am I pretending to kill Germans? I am restaging the fight against Hitler and fascism. Why am I pretending to kill Britons? I am recreating the actions of Germans called upon to fight for their country. If such a justification is really called for, I am killing Russians to save Eastern Europe from 50 years of oppression and occupation and to prevent a nuclear war (Uncle Joe wouldn't have one until 1949 but we didn't know that). I am killing Americans to liberate my Allies in the Great Patriotic War from the oppression of their ruling class exploiters, and to insure that Germany will never rise again and invade Mother Russia. But my T10s are no match for their Pershings (mwahaha)! You can no longer place your battles in reality and history – all you can do is just simulate two historical armies killing each other for no reason. Cool! As has been noted, Steel Panthers permitted staging any two nations against one another. I suspect it sold a lot more copies than CM, not because of this feature, but it had more exposure in the general gaming community. There was no outcry against war games or SP over this, because people saw it for what it was- the digital equivalent of tin soldiers. BTS has tastefully resisted the more ridiculous effects: fleeing civilians, Normandy cows, horses, oozing blood, and death camps (all of which have been requested here), and we are left with a pure tactical sim. The whole bit about prolonging the war is just weird. It could be argued that the longer we waited after 1945, the less likely all-out war between US-USSR (Nato and Warsaw Pact) became, thanks to nuclear proliferation and our old friend Mutual Assured Destruction. So if modeling an east-west land war is permissible in the 80s, due to its hypothetical likelihood, it should be even more so in 1945. Slinging ICBMs would interrupt a lot more lives than rolling the tanks to Moscow, or Paris, as the case may be. I played the hell out of Missile Command too, for that matter. And this battle might have obviated Korea and Vietnam, not to mention countless other surrogate conflicts around the world either caused or intensified by the Cold War. The people modeled in this game are all allies now, and if we can get over a world war, I suggest we can detach ourselves from a game. The Soviet regime is in the same historical ashcan as the Third Reich so I don't think they'll be overly offended. Our own militaries stage hypothetical games against allies for their exercise value (at least they used to). It isn't morally reprehensible to want the same from CM. Anyway, if I played Manta Ray in a hypothetical Red Star/White Star, what harm would it do YOU? Any more than playing in view level 1 only? If you don't like it, don't do it.

Look in your CMBO directory... it's called "Combat Mission Bynd Ovr Prefs".

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by David Aitken: were you crippled? Were any of your friends killed? Were you, or anyone close to you, raped or tortured? Was your hometown razed to the ground? I mean that seriously... Someone safe at home in the US, maybe. I can assure you that someone in Berlin or Moscow would not regard the possibility so casually.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> This is just bizarre. In every scenario we play, historical or imaginary, people were, or would have been, maimed, crippled, or killed (the raping and torturing is really over the top). This comes with the war game genre. To say that simulating Beyond the Elbe is somehow more sanguine, or more disrespectful, than simulating Normandy's hedgerows, is indefensible. In CMBO, WWII is a vehicle for the imagination. The accuracy of the sim is what makes the imagination's fruits valid. Testing tactical hypotheses is valid and bloodless against any "Orange" force. This whole "more sensitive than thou" argument is hypocritical, to the extent that it draws some arbitrary distinction between battles that never occured between historical combatants, and battles that never occured between non-historical combatants. CMBO is about taking tactical simulation to the limit and I don't know why anyone would want to pull back on the reins now.

I have killed more little digital people this weekend than probably died on D-Day. They didn't feel a thing. I think a post-April '45 scenario would be excellent- CM: Beyond the Elbe! Every Quick Battle is a hypothetical war. No one gets hurt. The shootin' part has been over for 55 years, with many others (including US-USSR surrogate conflicts) in between. What's one more hypothetical battle between friends? Fer cryin' out loud, this is a wargame, and I am really at a loss to understand the nature of this objection.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Formerly Babra: his panzer crews were last seen fleeing their tanks and hightailing it down the route de la croute, so all is not lost... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Various calumnies in the thread for wayward boys. Elvis, you whining little dung heap, I have been too busy turning around turns, since wiping my Outer Croda this morning, to even monitor your pathetic challenge. The Carousel of Death turns swiftly today. But maybe I'll ride your little horsey if I get some time here. Pawboomboom is dead, no doubt bouncing along the polluted bottom of the Seine like a soggy crouton. PeterNZer is turning into a war at last. As long as that goddam 14 incher isn't belt-fed he is gonna die lots now. His frigging sneaking hulking stinking tank is much luckier than it knows. Crodette has also moved to the front burner. His premature ejaculation blew the ambush, however, and his advance guard is now amid a web of targeting lines, like a spider with the shadow of the bootheel over it. Say cheese. Hakko and I move into the deadly endgame of a scenario that began before BTS was formed, I think. Who knows? Germanboy is breathing his last and painfully so. The scenario is more balanced than he is, of course. His boys are running fast but I am determined to use up all this cool ammo. Babra: This one has taken a frightful toll, but who cares, they're only french. And I'm not German. He seems to share this outlook since he's been nuking us all indiscriminately. I forget who else and no doubt with good reason. Droppen Sie dead. Auf Wiederkillen.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Seanachai: I'd love to see the long time posters get their due, and be acknowledged for their participation (although I might add that there are several who've been here for a donkey's age, and they're as useless as ****e and twice as annoying to step in). <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Don't tread on me! Uselessness is not a crime...

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Major Tom: I could not see Germany or Japan behaving any different than how the United States and Russia did at the end of WWII... Neither had a stake in continuing a devestating war...In comparison of populations, I could not say that the Axis powers would have been any more or less racist than the Allied powers... We just were better in covering up, or excusing our holocausts than the Germans or Japanese.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I'll try to beat the padlock here, with a few quick clarifications: There was no need to drag obvious flame-bait into what might have been a legitimate discussion (the what-if Germany-Japan victorious debate has about 5% to do with atrocities- it was about the subsequent geo-politics). US and Russia differed more than a little, in the post-war administration of territories. It would be facile to ignore the direction of refugee flow, among other things. If what you mean is that we failed to blow one another up, ok yeah. "Neither had {sufficient} stake in continuing a devestating war" is about as far as the analogy goes. I don't know how you can say German administration would have been "any less racist" when it was literally a racist program to begin with. You can point to many examples of American racism, then and today, but you do not find racist dogma legalized and enforced in the Constitution. Nazism was meaningless without racism. I would like to be able to discuss this without the pejoratives normally associated with the word "racism", but whether I do or not, you cannot divorce any definition of "Nazism" from racism. Any Nazi would have been offended by such a manipulation. As for the rest, you have dragged this discussion right back to where it was locked up the first time. It really would be interesting to explore the plausible outcomes of an Axis victory, and it's a shame you couldn't let it go at that. The motivations of Germany and Japan were really very different, as were their national outlooks, and that would have been interesting to explore.

Soon, I will be back. This is not good news for those whose various topplements have been staved off only by my absence with this goddam NT. Nor is it particularly good news for those who are turning this thread into a personal chat room. Duly noted, little worms. Of course butts and poop are funny stuff. But we expect a little extra effort here, some creativity, and lots of ill-will. Those whacky butts must be separated from their owners, tanned, inverted, shellacked, and set upon the mantle to hold the ashes of self-esteem, to truly merit mention here. We have a lofty mission on this BBS and we must meet that challenge for a Peng Thread death sentence against an outsider, say Binkie, to have any meaning. Please try to maintain standards for another 24 hours or so.

I have an IV bag of JW Black hanging over my PC, which may explain some of my late night moves... Anyway, here I am on another road trip down in Foobar-land, and what do I spy on the shelf tonight but Glendronach 15? Never tried it, golden opportunity, so down the hatch. NOT recommended. Very alcoholic with a mediciny aftertaste. I was quite disappointed (the more so, since I passed up a perfectly good bottle of Laphroiag on the same shelf). I would be interested to know if our educated members have had similar experiences with the Glendronach, perhaps of different ages. Barring informed opinion to the contrary, it is off my list for good.

Chup: "(While) Japan did not have a stated program of racial superiority, I don't think it's possible to ignore that an unofficial one affected their actions." And I wouldn't ignore it, either (I am enslaved by one, as regular readers may recall). But it would allow them much more latitude in their dealings with client states. Both Germany and Japan had interesting questions about their successions pending. What did a militarily successful Germany do after Hitler (or, about Hitler, et al)? It is unlikely that the fanatics would have prevailed for long, any more than they have after any other revolutionary authoritarian regimes (the successors always behave like reactionaries). As the desperation of battle for western domination faded, what would replace it? FWIW, I lived in Germany for a while, and they just don't strike me as inherently fanatical- far from it. Once the chip was off their shoulder I think the requirements of empire building (as opposed to conquering) would have propelled many moderate Germans to positions of authority. They really just want to make money and winter in Spain. The Japanese had more immediate problems of authority in a post-war situation. I don't pretend to be an authority on the somewhat bizarre workings of their various factions, but the Army vs. Navy, conservative vs. "modern", paranoid vs. curious, and many other contradictions had no formal outlet for resolution. The Emperor, even then, seems to have been more of a figurehead, and at the mercy or disposal of the leading faction at any point. His influence over the minds of the people was much greater than his influence over policy, and he was more the tool of the ruling faction than a true leader. In Japan the future would be determined by the dominant party/faction, and they can be either magnanimous or horrible in victory... they have demonstrated both in this century. They unquestionably feel superior to their neighbors, and while this is a generalization I think it one of the safest. They were not, however, bent on their extermination or enslavement. There really were some strange militarist mystics amongst their ranks. I don't think it is possible for me to second-guess this oddest and most contradictory of peoples. I can see a sort of Pax Fascista for a decade or two while these two Empires dealt with the complexities of vast new dominions and internal power struggles, as the dividing line between them would have been generally clear and satisfactory. Obviously the rule of law had gone clear out the window in matters of state power in both lands, which makes prediction a lot harder.

Perhaps there should be a taunting guidebook. Extended fantasies about the personal beliefs, diet, and trappings of a perfect stranger are stupid, wasted efforts, since they necessarily fall wide of the Mark. What sort of tedious drudge would create a myth, then try to wound it? How did it escape a public education without the least knowledge of common literary allusions (if I recognized a popular quote from Einstein, would I be a physicist)? Why does it have an unhealthy preoccupation with balls and the expulsion of digestive gases? To it, I would have one of my staff say, were it fortunate enough to be addressed a second time even indirectly, that it has much to learn about taunting and probably far more about the nature of literacy. Bismullahi rahmani rahim, smite the infidel that mistakes literacy for reverence, for he is a waste of bandwidth. Disembowel the unclean dog and bury him in the skin of a pig. May the sands close over the hole he inhabits so that no man shall find his bones, none shall address his spirit, and he shall claw at the earth unheeded until the end of time.